Chris Makes Chocolate Chip Cookies

[exciting string music]

The thing about chocolate chip cookies

is that, you know, everybody's eaten one,

everybody has an opinion.

There are the people who want them super crispy,

wafer-like, soft and chewy, raw cookie dough in the center,

standing up off of the baking sheet,

and the things that came out most of all

were crispy, chewy, having like a crisp edge,

but that fades into a little bit of a gooey, chewy center.

So that's what we tried to achieve here.

In chocolate chip cookies in particular,

they're like snowflakes, at the end of the day,

they're all a little bit different.

For recipes where they are a very well-known thing,

usually what we try to do is

have a really long development process.

The reason being that what I like to do

is from the beginning, I'll cook recipes

that are very well-reviewed, just to see what's out there,

and what we liked about each one.

[magical chimes]

Oh, yeah, well I'm very familiar

with the Rick Martinez chocolate toffee chip cookies.

I love that recipe.

Honestly, this takes most closely

after that cookie as its inspiration.

We worked over a period of several weeks,

I had people trying these, I went through multiple,

multiple, multiple rounds of development,

even with my own cookies once I understood

the direction I wanted to go in.

But I knew from a flavor perspective

that I wanted at least some brown butter in this cookie,

so that is the starting point.

We're gonna take this to the stove,

and we're gonna take it from there.

So here's the thing about brown butter in cookies:

When you use a liquid fat, there's no need to cream out

the butter and the sugar, which is amazing,

because in this instance, you don't even need

to use a stand mixer, or a hand mixer

for that matter, for this recipe.

We're asking very little of you in terms of equipment.

What we are asking is that you brown your butter,

so just let it kind of all melt together over low heat.

So I'm starting to get a little browning, that's great.

I just wanna make sure everything stays moving,

and that nothing sticks to the pan.

So that's the kind of color I'm talking about.

I'm gonna transfer that kinda quickly

so I can stop the cooking.

I added the rest of the butter right away.

It might kind of start to foam and spit a little bit,

and that means that you're driving off the water content

of the butter, which is what we don't wanna do.

So I'm just gonna do a little tester with one piece

of the butter, just to see if it's cooled enough.

Yeah, a lot of people were very insistent

in wanting grams for this, and you know what?

They are absolutely right.

We heard you, and we republished the recipe with grams,

just to take into account your needs and wishes.

Honestly, there's no reason why we should be

not publishing grams in our baking recipes.

So this is dark brown sugar,

which has the highest molasses content.

Molasses actually has a good amount of acidity to it,

and that acidity is what is gonna react

with our baking soda, which is our only leavener

in this cookie aside from our egg.

So brown sugar is goin' in,

along with quarter cup white sugar.

As you can see, this is gonna stay super grainy,

because the fat does not wanna dissolve it.

However, the sugar is more or less smooth

from the standpoint of there are no huge lumps here.

I am going to mix my dry ingredients,

just so that they're ready to go,

so this is one and 1/2 cups of all-purpose flour.

I'm putting in 3/4 of a teaspoon of baking soda,

and then one and 1/4 teaspoons of kosher salt.

I'm just gonna incorporate these.

You need to do this in the smallest bowl possible.

[laughing]

Only using one whole egg for this recipe,

and part of the reason for that

is egg whites act akin to water in terms of

how they interact with the proteins in the flour.

So I didn't want to introduce too much liquid

from the standpoint of having a dough

that was too loose to work with.

What I found was that what had the biggest impact

on the flavor of the cookie,

but also helped control spread,

and gave kind of a cool, glossy sheen was the yolk.

So I've got one whole egg,

and then I've got two yolks from large eggs here.

So one whole egg plus two yolks going in here.

And this is the point at which those sugars

are gonna start to dissolve.

It's gonna take on this nice kind of...

Almost matte sheen.

So you don't have to go crazy whisking,

but that's the vanilla going in.

But you definitely wanna see that change

where it goes smooth on you.

So here we have Guittard 70% bar chocolate,

so it's really kind of assertively bittersweet,

you get that fruitiness and that brightness

from the acidity of the chocolate.

I chop these into pretty rough pieces.

What's nice about the bar

is you can do it relatively quickly.

And what's cool about breaking down the bar yourself

is that you get these lovely irregular pieces.

You get some big, fat chocolate moments,

and then you get these little kind of chocolate shards.

There is an aesthetic to that that I really, really liked.

I felt so much better about putting a chocolate cookie

out into the world that felt like it had

a little bit more of a modern look to it,

with those kind of graphic, irregular chocolate pieces.

So now dry ingredients are going in,

I'm folding these together.

There's not really much of a danger of overworking this,

certainly not doing it by hand.

You definitely want to work all

of that flour into this mixture.

Just in the last 30 seconds, it went from being

fairly loose to like, loose, but stiffening by the second.

So for anyone who felt like their first pass

might have spread too much, I would say this is the point

where once the chocolate goes in,

you could rest this dough, just kind of room temperature,

even for five or 10 minutes.

That should make a pretty big difference

in terms of getting the flour to hydrate

and stiffen this dough up.

So chocolate is going in.

There is gonna be a lot of spread with these.

This is about the consistency that it should be.

It should be able to stand up

on the baking sheet, hold that detail.

The cookie scoop just allows me to know

exactly how much I'm putting into each one,

and therefore how much space I need on the cooking sheet.

So I find eight cookies on a sheet is about all you can do.

So you do need two cookie sheets for this.

One person was quite irate that this recipe

was only yielding 16 cookies.

At the end of the day, wouldn't you rather

have 16 dangerously close to perfection cookies

than 24 smaller, you know, compromised cookies?

I don't know.

Baking these at 375, which is kind of

on the higher end for a cookie.

Part of it is that we want the heat of the oven

to really set that edge, give it a little bit of color

and a little bit of crispness.

But once the heat kind of sets the edge,

we want it to kind of spread out to about yea big or so.

Once that edge is set and baked,

it's gonna kinda arrest the lateral spread of the cookie

and make it wanna spread up a little bit.

Anyway, here goes nothin'.

I like to stagger them a little bit on the baking sheets,

just to keep the air circulating around.

[Man Offscreen] So at eight minutes.

Oh, yeah, let's read some scathing reviews.

[Man Offscreen] Let me grab my computer.

All right, M. Figgs of Montreal:

Honestly the best basic cookie recipe I've ever used.

[children cheering]

These were definitely a few notches up

from regular chocolate chip cookies.

The brown butter added great flavor.

[children cheering]

Made mine pretty large and still had 24 cookies.

That seems wrong.

Now let's get to some of the bad stuff.

Not sure what I'm doing wrong,

these cookies turned out really runny for me.

[children booing]

Anyone have suggestions?

Made these cookies using the new

weight measurements provided.

They spread quite a bit, so I ended up with a thinner cookie

than I usually prefer, but the real issue I'm having

with these is how greasy/oily they feel

when you're eating them.

[children booing]

I mean, that's something that's kind of interesting to me,

the comments about greasiness,

because when is grease butter,

and when is greasiness buttery-ness?

Not to skip ahead here, but just for the sake of argument,

there is in the texture a lot more...

Richness-forward quality, but in terms of like...

Greasiness, I certainly have more chocolate

than butter on my fingers right now.

So I don't know what to chalk it up to,

if it's a different brand of flour

that's hydrating in a different way,

a different amount of protein that's not...

So it's not activating a similar amount of gluten

to what we're developing with here.

This is far from over.

If there's anything that Guns 'N' Roses has taught us

is that it's never over, never say never,

Axl can reach out to Slash, they can get back

on the same page, they can make their next album happen.

And look, there's a lot of people

who reached out to me via DM on Instagram,

and I feel like I responded or reacted

to the vast majority of them.

I tried to diagnose issues where I could.

I also, frankly, saw a lot of great-looking cookies.

At the end of the day, there is gonna be a tremendous amount

of variability, just between ovens, users,

ingredients, and all the rest of it.

[chiming]

Into it.

As you can see, even between...

The two baking sheets, these have a little bit more cracking

across the top, these have a little bit more

of a ripple to them.

Same dough, same oven, same time, but snowflakes.

I feel like this is my Everest.

I feel like this is something that you could work on

and refine your entire life.

I will never be done with it.

I am it, and it is me, and yeah.

It's very intense putting this out into the world.

So anyway, fly.

They're so beautiful.

I know you see the flaws, but you just...

[laughing]

You just have to see the beauty.

No, I see that too, you know.

A lot went into it.

Yeah.

I know, people don't see that,

they just see a picture, and they don't know.

Can I tell you a little-known fact about myself?

Yeah.

This is a true story.

My first word was cookie.

No way!

First word, because every time I said it,

my parents would reward me for speaking,

and they would give me another cookie.

Oh, yeah.

And I was like, this is [bleeping] great.

I'm just gonna keep saying cookie.

Future food editors unite.

That's right.

Look, come on, give me a break right now.

That's hot, that's hot.

They're perfectly warm.

Yeah, that's nice.

I don't know if this is something people have noted,

there's a savoriness to the cookie.

The richness of the chocolate, the bitterness,

the texture, the whole thing.

It is a real delight.

I'm just gonna back away.

All right, cool.

All right, see ya.

Oh, wow, they're beautiful.

Are these BA's best?

They're BA's tried real [bleeping] hard. [laughs]

And they won.

So nice.

Mm-hmm.

The crisp, yeah.

It's trying to get those two things happen

at the same times that's tricky.

Gets almost that crumbly-crispness,

like the edge will do that, and yet the center bends.

That's the world I'm living in.

Take the journey with me.

Make cookies, be happy, that's all I have to say.

I'm done.

Engineering our own.

Cool, we're good.

[grinder whirring]

It's cool, my mom said I need to smile more

in my videos anyway, so Andy's on-target with that.